By in Osteopathy

Conventional Medicines’ Inefficiency in Treating Aches and Pains

There is an unfortunate lack of education within the NHS and conventional medicine regarding how to diagnose and treat the most common aches, pains, and injury problems. Even the most knowledgeable GPs are poor substitutes for a good clinical manual therapist. My own experience is of frustration with the inconsistency of the way my own patients have been managed either before presenting to me or as part of a combined management process.

Most doctors are well aware of this, but some seem to be worryingly unaware. An instructor at St. Leonards Hospital in Hoxton made the point that:

“Undergraduate training is focused on hospital orthopaedics (broken bones and anything else that’s amenable to surgery) or rheumatology (nasty inflammatory diseases) which comprise a minority of the aches/pains/strains and injuries that people actually suffer from”.

This is not actually surprising as Doctors have to work with a vast array of conditions, and pain is often too subjective, slippery, and minor compared to other pathologies. Musculoskeletal pain was largely neglected by medical science until about the 1980s, and it remains the domain of specialists to this day, simply because medicine had bigger fish to fry (e.g. curing major infectious diseases and so on). Nevertheless, the severity and importance of a lot of physical pain has been underestimated, or patients branded malingerers, by too many doctors for too long.

Medicine should now be taking pain more seriously. There have been numerous studies that have concluded there is inadequate training and knowledge of common musculoskeletal conditions given to doctors and that those in practice often ignore some of the guidelines for the care of musculoskeletal conditions such as lower back pain. For example, the current NICE (National Institute for Health Care Excellence) guidelines for the treatment of low back pain is up to 9 sessions with a manual therapist, consisting of massage, joint mobilisation, manipulation, and acupuncture. Yet, the majority of patients that present to me in the clinic are either unhappy with the current level of care they have received through the NHS or have given up on seeking advice due to poor previous experience or problems getting appointments.

I am not in any way saying that you should avoid your GP if you are concerned about your health. After all, when it comes to musculoskeletal pain the benefit of prescription pain medication can never be underestimated. However, the advice and treatment on offer at manual therapy clinics will identify and treat the cause of the symptoms and not just mask the symptoms while they slowly resolve on their own.

This article was written by Matthew Oliver.

Louise